China Airborne Read Online Free Page A

air; Walter Wang settled into the backseat, and we went to the end of the runway to take off.
    The engine came up smoothly; the plane reached an air speed of 70 knots, at which point Claeys began easing its nose upward; at about the same time as we got a safe distance off the runway, we disappeared into the brown blear of the standard big-city Chinese pollution shroud. And we were off.
Into the clouds
    In flying, the big distinction is in the clouds versus out of the clouds. When out of the clouds, you can see where you’re going and steer the plane as if it were a car—with the added ability to go up and down. When you’re in the clouds, everything about controlling the plane is different. It’s like driving a car while blindfolded, but worse. Assuming he’s not near a cliff, even a blindfolded driver can keep a car securely on the ground. In a plane it’s simply impossible to tell up from down by your own bodily senses, if you can’t
see
the ground or the horizon to assess whether the plane is turning, climbing, or holding a straight-and-level course. This is the hardest aspect of aeronautics to believe unless you have tried it. 1 You control the plane by obsessively “scanning” the dashboard gauges, constantly comparing readings from one with the others, and taking advantage of their gyroscopes, which give an idea of where the horizon would be if you were able to see it.
    Because of the clouds, and because it was night, and because it’s not possible in China just to fly around without the government’s approval as it is in much of the United States, from takeoff onward we were already operating under instrument flight rules, following controllers’ instructions about when to climb,which direction to turn, and what waypoints to cross on our way south. This should have been fine, but it soon became more complicated than we had foreseen. Around the world, air-traffic controllers are supposed to be able to talk with pilots in English, in addition to their local language. If you listen to controllers’ discussions on the radio, you will hear a mixture of Spanish and English in Mexico, Korean and English in Korea, French and English in France, and an improbable English-only discourse most of the time in Japan, even though most of those speaking are clearly Japanese. (I ascribe this to a greater emphasis on doing things the “right” way in Japan than in many other places.) When traveling on an airline that lets passengers listen to air-traffic control, I would hear, at China’s main international airports—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—controllers talking rapid Mandarin to Chinese pilots and careful, accented, but clear English to Germans, Japanese, Americans, Turks, and other outsiders. But here in the interior of China, there would be no reason for controllers to keep up that competency. Claeys, skilled in Chinese, felt for procedure’s sake that as a foreign pilot he should speak English over the airwaves. But every exchange was halting—and I began to think that the controllers just wanted to forget that we were there.
    Between Changsha and Zhuhai stood the mountains of southern Hunan. They are not tremendously high by world standards, but they were higher than our airplane was at its initial assigned altitude. And unless the controller gave us instructions to climb—as we would routinely expect a few minutes into the flight—we would be headed for trouble soon. Even for airliners, instrument flights usually take place in stages: first up to 3,000 feet, then 5,000 feet, then for the airliners well up into the “flight levels,” usually above 30,000 feet. Airliners fly that high precisely because the air is so thin. Within limits,the higher it goes, the less wind resistance, or drag, an airplane has to force itself through, so the better fuel mileage it gets. It looked as if we needed to get to about 10,000 feet to go safely over the mountains—that was our guess from the charts, which themselves